Ever noticed how directing a film and managing a production outage feel oddly similar? Both demand calm under chaos, clarity in communication, and the ability to turn panic into precision.

In this talk, I’ll share how my journey from SRE Lead to filmmaker shaped a new way of approaching reliability and observability. Over 15 years in IT, I’ve faced midnight incidents, silent failures, and dashboards that told half the truth. As a filmmaker, I’ve learned the art of narrative timing, emotional pacing, and framing chaos into a coherent story — lessons that now define how I handle outages.

We’ll explore real-world examples of production incidents that could have turned disasters, and how applying a director’s mindset — anticipation, empathy, and framing — turned them into success stories. From designing reliable systems to communicating post-mortems like scripts, this talk blends art and engineering into a practical, human playbook for modern developers.

Because when you treat incidents like scenes, observability like storytelling, and recovery like editing — your system uptime becomes more than just a number; it becomes a masterpiece.